Stardust Playhouse's 'Zoo Story' shows its age

Edward Albee's prize-winning play, "Zoo Story," premiered in West Berlin in 1959, a perfect place for its debut.

In the late 1950s, European playwrights were producing material for the Theatre of the Absurd, their central belief being that human existence has no higher meaning or purpose, and thus efforts to understand our life experience are pointless.

Surely this theme is no better expressed than in "Zoo Story," at once the triumph and burden of the play.

Thus, though I was mesmerized by the excellent performances of the father-son actors Mark and Tyler Shilstone, who play the only two characters in the play (and who also directed it), I was less engaged by the play itself.

The plot of "Zoo Story takes place entirely within one act. In New York's Central Park, a young man, Jerry, approaches an older man, Peter, who is sitting on a bench, reading on a fine Sunday afternoon.

By way of seeking directions, Jerry asks if he can talk to him. Peter reluctantly assents, thereby opening the door to a conversation that soon turns into something like a policeman interrogating a suspect.

It becomes intensely intimate and then desperately sad, as the young man describes his squalid rooming house with its lonely occupants and a life devoid of any meaningful human contact.

Even the snarling dog owned by the drunk, pathetic landlady couldn't be coaxed or coerced into a relationship with him.

In contrast, Peter has a wife, two daughters, cats, parakeets and two television sets, all in a comfortable Upper East Side apartment that he supports with a good job in a publishing company. Their lives could not be more disparate — their economic and social class difference as wide as the sea.

This is, after all, America, where class differences are defined less by family heritage than by material success.

Peter and Jerry really have no common language through which to connect. Jerry struggles to be understood; Peter struggles to understand him.

This core lack of connection is at the heart of the message of "Zoo Story."

Jerry's storytelling becomes more urgent, Peter becomes less tolerant, and finally we see that Jerry has planned all along for a violent dénouement.

And where is the zoo in "Zoo Story"? We never hear the story of Jerry at the zoo, although repeatedly, almost elegiacally, he promises to tell it.

All we learn is that Jerry goes to the zoo to learn how animals relate to animals, how humans relate to animals, but what he found there were animals living in solitude behind bars, certainly a metaphor for the human condition.

Because we cannot truly communicate with one another, we are all in some way alone — locked behind bars.

Jerry and Peter are played remarkably by the Shilstones, who manage to impart real power to one of Jerry's questions, "What are you trying to do, make sense of things?"

In 1959, it seemed a question worth asking, an effort worth making. In this era, where the truth is so elusive and beliefs replace facts, the question seems to lose its relevance.

"Zoo Story" came to the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City in 1960, where I was in the audience along with others dressed in bohemian black, our own tribute to the existentialist notion of alienation.

Then we were more than willing to believe that there was no point to life, no faith to enhance its meaning, no relationships to give it purpose. Existentialism was new and interesting then, much less so now.

Albee is a great American playwright, but in 2012, the "Zoo Story" of 1959 seems like an anachronism.GO!